Summary

Proposal

Eliminate all media that is not under a free license (that is: forbid Fair Use)

Motivation

Unfree files should not be included in a free encyclopedia (or whichever WMF project it may concern). If parts of our projects are proprietary, then we have not achieved our goal of building a free encyclopedia.

Also, without fair use, we encourage the free licenses and the creation of new free media, stimulate the growth of Wikimedia Commons, as well as greater interaction between projects. One example might be the licensing of Ubisoft games screenshots. Without the ban on non-free images, Ubisoft would have never donated any screenshots to use them under a free license. We'd be still stuck with low-res fair use images. In the long run, allowing only free images might be better for the amount and quality of usable content.

From a philosophical point of view, fair use doesn't fix the inherent problem inflicted by the existence of copyrighted media. While it might fix the problem for us, it is not a solution to everyone, and as we want our content to be usable by everyone, we should not embrace fair use. Instead, we should be focused on making the work available to everyone.

And yet, to avoid legal problems which may arise.

Currently any film studio, TV company, publisher or other copyright owner can remove all fair use images that we are using of their work simply by releasing an image themselves. That image would of course be of their choice, but if it was the only one available to illustrate an article we would be very likely to use it, and the fact that it has been released under a free licence undermines our fair use arguments for other images. If we don't have fair use images on our sites then the situation wouldn't arise, as we would be just a text based site for much of popular culture.